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I do agree that a tamper-resistant store would be useful for things like journalism, legislature, official government communication, campaign content for politi
by beager 8y ago
I do agree that a tamper-resistant store would be useful for things like journalism, legislature, official government communication, campaign content for politicians, etc. A distributed ledger for these would also be good because then you’re verifying that store in public view.
It’s too bad all you can build with that is a meager, profitable SaaS business, not a wild speculative crypto-billionaire rocket ride.
- pbreit 8y agoWhat about “right to be forgotten” laws?
- beager 8y agoAs it pertains to private citizens, I would not recommend something like this to archive or verify their personal data. But for government records, campaign records, etc, I would think that those laws do not apply to that information.
- cesarb 8y agoThe hash chain doesn't contain the data, only a hash of the data. So the original article can still be altered, and the hash chain would only prove that it had been changed. I believe nothing in these "right to be forgotten" laws forbid noting that an article has been edited to remove names.
- celticninja 8y agoYou could also check that only names have been changed by hashing the article after replacing the names (if known).
- Dangeranger 8y agoAn interesting alternative would be to hash "chunks" of the original article so that a future verification could be applied to particular parts of the content. Let's imagine you hashed every 32 bytes, you could then determine which chunks changed at what times, without revealing the plain text content.
- dredmorbius 8y agoThe question of how to identify large complex works, of potentially variable forms (markup or editing format, HTML, PDF, ePub, .mobi, etc.) such that changes and correspondences can be noted, is a question I've been kicking around. Chunk-based hashing could work. Corresponding those to document structure (paragraphs, sentences, chapters, ...) might make more sense.
- Dangeranger 8y agoYeah that's an interesting question. How to parse the content into meaningful pieces and then hash in such a way that the content is not known, but the hash can be mapped to where it was in the document at an earlier time.
- dredmorbius 8y agoKeep in mind that at the scale of a large work, some level of looseness may be sufficient. Identity and integrity are distinct, the former is largely based on metadata (author, title, publication date, assigned identifiers such as ISBN, OCLC, DOI, etc.). Integrity is largely presumed unless challenged. I'm familiar with RDA, FRBR, and WEMI, somewhat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_Bibliographic_Records https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_Bi...
- pythia__ 8y agoThey will be as effective as anti-piracy law would be if pirates were paid to seed. At best they will prevent respectable publications from directly using distributed archives as a source.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoThe National Research Council of Canada is doing just this for public auditing of their allotted grants and funding: https://nrc-cnrc.explorecatena.com/en/ https://nrc-cnrc.explorecatena.com/en/ Using a company called Catena: https://explorecatena.com/about?lng=en https://explorecatena.com/about?lng=en